U.S. President Donald Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities has once again raised the prospect of Washington destroying North Korea’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). That’s only natural given Trump’s first term in office, when he appeared on the brink of launching such an attack on North Korea. But as analysts have pointed out, Pyongyang’s WMD programs have grown to alarming proportions over the past decade. As a result, such a strike has virtually no chance of succeeding.
What analysts haven’t pointed out is that serious planning for a first strike against North Korea’s arsenal was initiated by then-President Barack Obama almost five years before Trump’s “fire and fury” threats, and those plans came up short.
Obama and Trump met for the first – and only – time days after the Republican candidate had won the presidential election. Obama had decided to personally take on the task of making sure an uninformed Trump, who didn’t even know there were two Koreas, understood that Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons would soon be able to devastate American cities.
Obama warned Trump that Kim Jong Un was about to cross a technological Rubicon. Obama often told his advisors that a future president might have to attack North Korea before it launched its weapons. While Obama informed Trump that he had ordered the Pentagon to figure out how to do that, their plan still fell short of achieving the objective.
Obama’s warning may have been too successful. It certainly left an impression on the president-to-be. An astounded Trump repeatedly asked his advisers how past presidents could have left him with this mess. He would also ask everyone, including the musician Kid Rock, what to do.
Trump would later claim in public that Obama was about to start a war with North Korea, but all Obama was trying to do was to arm future presidents with a plan to prevent the destruction of American cities.
Trump also claimed that Obama has been “begging for a meeting” with Kim Jong Un. Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, called Trump’s accusation “horseshit,” but like many of Donald Trump’s pronouncements, there was a grain of truth in what he said.
The North Korean arsenal grew to alarming proportions during Obama’s two terms in office. In 2009, intelligence estimates predicted the threat of a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) was still a decade off. But in January 2011, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made headlines when he announced that North Korea could attack U.S. cities in five to ten years.
It turned out Pyongyang’s long-range missile program had been hiding in plain sight. Suspicious purchases of “large off-road vehicles,” perfect for transporting a new mobile ICBM, were announced on a Chinese company’s website starting in October 2010. Deliveries started 8 months later.
In April 2012, those transporters appeared carrying a new missile dubbed the KN-08 in a massive Pyongyang parade celebrating Kim Il Sung’s birth. The missile was a potential game-changer for the Pentagon, since a stationary missile could be destroyed before launch. Mobile missiles were likely to survive an attack. Some experts argued the paraded missiles were only mockups and a hoax. The Pentagon, however, believed they were intended to help build a new weapon.
The KN-08 confirmed the worst fears of a handful of Defense Department officials. James “Jim” Miller, the third ranking civilian official at the Pentagon, had initially supported the majority view that the real North Korea threat was short-range missiles aimed at U.S. troops and allies – South Korea and Japan – in Northeast Asia. However, the more Miller and an aide, Tom Ehrhard, a former Air Force officer who didn’t engage in wishful thinking, talked to intelligence analysts, the more they realized the ICBM danger was real.
The two were joined by four-star Admiral James “Sandy” Winnefeld, Jr., then the newly appointed vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Tasked to protect the continental United States from attack in his last job, Winnefeld’s wife had complained that Pyongyang ruined their holidays by launching rockets. He assured her he would take care of the problem. The admiral feared that North Korea would eventually be able to obliterate cities on the United States’ West Coast.
The April 2012 parade also set off alarm bells in the White House. Obama had been concerned about the North Korean threat. His daily brief, featuring the KN-08’s appearance, concluded that the missile wouldn’t be operational until it was successfully tested. But Obama sent an unequivocal message to the Pentagon. “I have to defend this country. I want you to take this seriously,” a senior military officer recalled the president as saying.
A successful North Korean satellite launch in December using a large rocket was a “big wake up call,” according to a Pentagon official. Then, Pyongyang’s nuclear detonation in February 2013, which it claimed helped develop nuclear warheads small enough to place on top of a rocket, proved to be the last straw.
Miller and Winnefeld won their fight. In March, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced a $1 billion initiative to buy 14 more Ground Based Interceptors, or GBIs, to add to the existing stockpile. They would protect the United States from Pyongyang’s “irresponsible and reckless provocations.”
However, complacency soon set in again. The Pentagon’s attitude was, “We’ve got it,” according to one Defense Department official, even though it became clear that a modest upgrade in U.S. missile defenses wouldn’t be able to cope with more than a handful of KN-08s. Officials reasoned, “If they launch a nuclear weapon at San Francisco, we will nuke them.”
That view wasn’t shared by everyone. A policy review ordered by Obama confirmed that Hagel’s GBI upgrade could easily be overwhelmed by a growing missile arsenal. The president ordered the Pentagon to consider the new North Korean ICBM operational even if it hadn’t been tested and to develop a plan to take “those missiles out” before they could be launched, according to a senior U.S. military officer. Obama didn’t want the military to “bring him another rock.”
The fight to find a solution to the growing North Korean threat was joined by a new important ally. Robert “Bob” Work, a Marine veteran who was appointed deputy secretary of defense, quickly focused on the danger, with the aid of Ehrhard, who had remained behind when Miller left the Pentagon.
History had proved that destroying mobile missiles is hard. The Allies only managed to stop one German V-1 rocket during World War II. None was destroyed during the 1991 “Great SCUD hunt” for Saddam Hussein’s mobile rockets.
However, technology had advanced. Missiles could be tracked more precisely, data could be transmitted more quickly, and more accurate weapons could destroy the missiles before they moved. Moreover, exotic “left of launch” technologies, such as cyberstrikes against computers that controlled the weapons, might destroy or disable missiles before they left the ground.
Both Work and Winnefeld had their own expert groups examining this new toolkit. While much of the Pentagon was fixated on the exotic to the exclusion of the pragmatic, those technologies were only “1 percent of the answer,” according to a senior Pentagon official. There was no substitute for old-fashioned detective work, tracking and blowing up North Korea’s missiles.
Ehrhard had experienced that drudgery as a young Air Force captain assigned the job of figuring out how to destroy mobile Russian missiles. The U.S. intelligence community had been monitoring Pyongyang’s weapons. but there was still much more work that remained to be done, tracking their daily movements and operations.
The Pentagon missed White House deadlines twice to come up with an ICBM-busting plan. When it did deliver, the proposals were bounced back. “It’s not good enough, I want another version,” Rice commented after seeing the first report. “Is that enough? What else can you do?” White House officials asked during briefings.
In May 2015, the Joint Chiefs of Staff organized a half-day long secret war game to review how much progress had been made. The answers fell far short of what Obama wanted. According to one White House aide, the Pentagon’s bottom line – “We are just not sure we can catch everything” – was disappointing.
Moreover, North Korea’s response to a strike could devastate South Korea and Japan. Past presidents going back to Richard Nixon, who considered attacking the North after it shot down an American spy plane in 1969, had faced the same dilemma. Seoul, a city with millions of inhabitants, is only 22 kilometers from the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
Still, Obama reminded his advisers that the United States had found Osama Bin Laden. Why couldn’t it find North Korea’s mobile missiles? “You’ve got to be working harder,” an aide heard him argue.
After Pyongyang’s hydrogen bomb test in September 2016, Obama asked again if it was possible to launch a preemptive strike supported by cyber operations.
It’s unlikely that the Obama administration ever succeeded in formulating a plan for an attack on North Korea. One administration official recalled that on a scale of one to ten, it rated a five on the priority list. By the end of Obama’s administration, North Korea was well on the way to building a nuclear arsenal that could withstand a U.S. first strike.
Eight years later, Trump’s options for such a strike would be even more constrained.
